


Cost

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Series: Some Lost ficlets [7]
Category: Lost
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He has chosen civilization. He only wishes he had known the cost. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cost

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted to livejournal, 2008. For the prompts: Sayid, green, post-island. Written in direct response to 4.03 "The Economist.")

The bell makes a strangled tinkling sound as he walks into the antique shop. The scent of worn leather and moldy books hits his nostrils, comforting like only these old things, this aged mahogany and this tarnished silver, can be. Old but civilized.   
  
He has chosen civilization. He only wishes he had known the cost.   
  
He feels old, so much older than he felt before the island. Time measured in months, but the soul measures with a different rule. He recalls an age of coming back to life that skipped and tripped forward, and now is an age of hardening, like the slow and steady drips of water that form stalactites.   
  
He looks too clean and calm to arouse anyone's suspicions of him, not even in this age of terrorism. His finger slips unconsciously across the furniture, the shelves; it is the only unconscious part of him, for the rest is observing, judging, waiting. Even when people don't watch him, he is watching them. But he is not a terrorist. He is something else.   
  
Even as he pauses to admire a folk art pot--made of clay and fired with a pale green glaze, a bit imperfect, but beautifully, artfully so--he is ready for what may come. There is always a what may come, now. His life may end any time.   
  
Since that is so, he lets himself admire. He stops, pressed down inside himself but expanding into this moment, finger smoothing over the lip of the green pot. Lovely, he thinks. He has enough money to buy it, regardless of its price.   
  
He will buy it. He is willing to pay. The cost does not matter. It is not really his money now, anyway.  
  
As he's walking up to the counter, watching the innocuous-looking old man there drag himself to his feet, he feels the weight of this thing in his hands. Solid. Slender, merely decorative handle, neck too small to be all that useful, but that's not the point. Use is not the point.  
  
But it always is, isn't it? he thinks. There's always appearance. If nothing else, if this clay pot finds no other use, it will contribute to the look of his flat, a flat belonging to a man named Nadib Hussein.   
  
He wonders with a momentary start, a shift in his consciousness as he sets the pot down, regarding it under different lighting now, if he even likes it. Surely he does. Surely it called to him.  
  
He realizes with only a flicker of horror that it more likely called to this man who did not come here by accident, who knows precisely how many people are in the shop, who knows precisely which, if any, he will need to keep in his sights and why. It called to the only man he is now.   
  
He sets the pot down on the counter carefully. It would not do to chip it.  
  
The proprietor does not look nervous. Nadib Hussein is glad.


End file.
